Summer Break (Part One)

Well, part one of my Summer break has arrived, as I look forward to a week off of work, enjoying the August sunshine. (Although, as ever, work did its level best to derail my attempts to finish early today with all the usual last-minute shenanigans of stuff that suddenly had to be done urgently and that only I could apparently do).   In addition to all the usual wandering along beaches and through forests that I usually do during these breaks, I'm also hoping to catch up with some more exploitation cinema and, more importantly, actually find time to write about it.  Over the past few months, work has left me too bloody exhausted to watch my usual quota of obscure and semi-forgotten exploitation titles, let alone write them up here.  I'm hoping that situation will change in the coming weeks.  Not just because of the time off I've got coming up during this month, but also because of changes at work.  There's now a strong possibility that I'll be able to divest myself of the half of someone else's job I've been doing on top of my own job.  Which, if nothing else, might reduce my stress levels.

To return to the present, next week is effectively the aperitif to the main event, Summer break wise, when I try to get myself into the stride of relaxing, before having to return to the fray of work again for a week, prior to taking the other two weeks of my break.  Last year, I did it the other way around, taking two weeks off, going back to work for a week before taking another week off.  Whilst it worked quite well, that last week felt too much like an afterthought and ended too abruptly for my liking.  We'll see if the other way around feels any more satisfactory.  I suppose I can't really ignore the other event which is going to dominate the next couple of weeks: the Olympics.  I was hoping that this time around, with everything in Rio happening in the middle of the night relative to the UK, we wouldn't have to endure the unrelenting TV coverage, as we did in 2012.  Nevertheless, the BBC has still contrived to turn both BBC1 and BBC4 into sports channels for the duration.  Do they honestly think that licence fee payers are really that interested in the Olympics?  I'm certainly not and would rather have the option of watching normal programming, particularly on BBC4.  I know there are other channels, but, not only are they making next to no effort to provide an alternative, I don't actually pay for them directly.  So, I guess it's a couple of weeks of solid exploitation movies, then.